defines life’s next of kin. The hole is a circle.I have come. Am here where I am going.Been here before. But is anybody home?--- ALBERT B. CASUGARevised, June 30, 2014

From the Author’s Notebook:

In his "Life and Death: The Burden of Proof", Deepak Chopra defines zero point: "At the moment of death the ingredients of your old body and old identity disappear... You do not acquire a new soul, because the soul doesn't have content. It's not "you" but the center around which "you" coalesces, time after time. It's your zero point."

What happens if the "center" does not hold? Will life and death still come from the same fibre? Will dying still be needed to extend the energy of living? Nothing is everything here.

"...The zero point provides the starting point from which everything in the universe springs. Since matter and energy are constantly emerging and then vanishing back into the void, the zero point serves as the switching station between existence and nothingness."

Chopra invokes the principles of physics to locate this point as he postulates that life and death are from the same stream. He quotes Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita: "Folding back in on myself, I create again and again."

One does not die, therefore. One continues the journey. The homo viatorcannot come home again.

If he must come home, is there anybody there to come home to?

It is questions like this that authors like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) exploit. Some of his fellow atheists have purchased ads in trams and transits to coyly admonish: "There probably is no God; go out and enjoy yourself tonight!" The critical word is "probably". They sound unsure about their certainty.

Because we have yet no certain way of knowing, we will maintain silence in our beds.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Halfway, between this river stone and many rocks
after,
Nara shall have gone from our echoes-call.
We have wandered into a sunken mangrove and wonder:
Is it as silent there? Are there crabs there?
What quiet mood is pinching bloodless our spleens?
This is another pool –-- navel upon the earth.
Always, always, we cannot be grown men here.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

I
am exploring poetic answers to the BIG QUESTIONS. (Cosmological, Philosophical.) Stuart Clark
listed down questions on The Universe in his Big Questions book, and Simon Blackburn
his list in The Big Questions: Philosophy. Our first question is from
Blackburn: WHAT IS IT (Life) ALL FOR?

IN SEARCH OF MEANINGS

Missing the many splendored thing

is one way of looking at this search.

How really far out there do we need

to fly, or espy for the god particle we

seemed to have lost in the process?

Why look behind the stars or in them?

Did we not lose our angels coming off
the crib or the direst cranny for shelter?
They do not grow with us, nor guide us.
Absconding, they quietly creep away.

Courage and devilment open our eyes

what stories we could live with or by,
or what places to board up or occupy.
Orphans at birth, we are alone at death.
What we mean here is what we make.

The womb is a meaning we cannot do

without: our final breath is a call:
Mother, hold me. Our first cry is a call:
Mother, love me. And then we grow old
shaping up all excess purposes and ends.

The tomb is yet another meaning we

scarcely begin to understand before it
pulls us to its urgent demand: living
to die trying to live while dying is easy
may yet be the meaning we struggle for.

BIG QUESTION 2: CAN WE UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER?*

YOU AND I

Words in their primary or immediate signification
stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them. ---John Locke

Are you
talking to me? Are you writing to me?

Answers
to questions you pitch into the darkare meanings I assign to
the questions you ask.

Always,
you and I, will be at opposite ends

of a
half-lit hallway where echoes are as urgentas the tremulous
confessions we burden ourselves

with each
time we look into our reflections

on one-way mirrors we look into when hidinghurts hurled like hunting
knives at target trees.

When I
call you, I mean to quickly hold you down,

to find
your voice, to shape your feelings, to ownyour thoughts, to mould you
as I want to have you.

I
interpret you through my own lenses and mirror

you as
you would me and have our confluence in this reflection, a
dragging into a cold dungeon

of
thought constructing meaning instead of finding

it, and
the “You” becomes the “I” held in bondage.Except that in this
conquest, I lose everything.

Questions and answers become elusive phantoms
of meaning, configurations of troth to the other
turn into fantasy, dreams and desire but delusions.

A trick, if there is one, is that
meaning
cannot mean beyond the compulsions
of a body made for this time only.

Does one learn to understand a heart’s
diction? What words leap out of silence?
Why does one need to listen to whispers
of absence? Why do sounds of sorrow
and madness register the same timbre
where indifference is the sounding board?
Is this why we would rather tolerate poets?

They read and write between the lines,
and could not care less about the simple,
palpable grip of certainty bereft of clarity.
What is clearness if the whole truth hides
behind the unknown here and a dark there?

If meaning could not be found in one
place,
here, why do we think we really understand?

Between the lines, we may yet begin to know
that we need to go there to be truly here.

In response to the Big Question: What is
Human Nature (The Problem of Interpretation) by Simon Blackburn, The Big Questions: Philosophy, Quercus
Publishing Plc, London, UK, pg. 18 etseq.

THE BIG QUESTIONS 4: A ZERO POINT

"Is Death To Be Feared?": One of the Big Questions included by Simon
Blackburn in his The Big Questions:
Philosophy. Here is my take for an answer.

A ZERO POINT

He said it first: after this death,

there is no other. It is peremptory.

But a world without a memory,

is as final as it can get without you.

Will it be a place where love is free?

Magical, except you can’t come back.

The pictures will be on the walls,

as mute as the hooks they hang on.

They will not talk to you, they can’t.

Even if they could, they would not.

Even if you have become the cobweb

wrapped tight on the broken frames,

you would not have been there. No.

You are not part of the furniture.

Like dust in abandoned houses, you

will inhabit the nooks and crannies,

and would not be disturbed until

termites take over. Too late then,

because you are not even a remnant

of temps
perdu, you are lost in time

and in space; even among the stars

and black holes, you are not there.

Like the sound of a single hand

clapping, you will not be heard.

The first death is always the last.

THE BIG QUESTIONS 5: CHOOSING CHAOS

Here is my poem-a-day answer to one of the Big Questions posited by
Simon Blackburn in his "Am I Free? (Choices and Responsibility)

CHOOSING CHAOS

Order is articulated chaos, its desire

an old rebellion that recalls the loss
of a streamlined paradise. Nothing
is needed here. Everything is given.

Then, why walk out of this Garden?

A provident Eden where everything
grew including his wanton dreams,
of having his way: orders be damned.

How simple things would have been.

Each pebble on the pond had a reason
to be there, each star a constellation
of sunlight, each sun a starter of life.

How serenely flowers would bloom

on the tip of thorns, or water flow
gently from the cracks of dry rocks,
and ripe fruit fall into open mouths.

Everything can happen here, nothing

Is everything there, a cipher is full.
How benignly would mountains rise
from the sea, and lakes from mudpools.

Would movement have moved this

conspiracy of stillness and creation?
He could not see this, nor feel the pain
of a yanked rib to make a woman cane.

A yearning rooted in his belly burned,

a lust for roaming the hidden valleys,
finding struggle with fish and grain
a surprising tug on his arms and loins.

Walking out on a promise of fullness

and unbridled abundance, did he
choose somehow to stand on hind legs
and see whence came the thunderous

offer? You
who are made in my image,

shall have dominion over all that yousee and taste, all that is still or
moves,or none but the courage to choose.

He chose to shape his own order out

of the unseen chaos of growth he
occupied East of Eden, and decided:

We will gather ourselves some fig leaves.

We will make ourselves our own image.

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 6: MEANING AS
AXIOM

Here's a poetic response to the
Big Question: Why is There Something and Not Nothing? (The Strange Ways of
Being)*

MEANING AS AXIOM

If another twig falls in the night,
as silently as it grew as a sapling
toward the sky, would that mean
anything anyway to anyone?

The graveyard of a fallen tree
may tell untold stories that stay
untold until a struggling stray root
breaks through dry rot and ground
for yet another flushed cherry tree.

The inexorable is also axiom here:
life begins in death in a spun gyre
twirling into flowers, forever moving.

Nothing is everything here, but there
where leaves had once fallen, broken
twigs spring back as fluttering birds
twittering on branches like new leaves.

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 8: BEING ON TIME (DOES TIME GO
BY? THE STRANGE RIVER OF TIME)

Painting by Salvador Dali

BEING ON TIME

When Time equals Being,
That would be the End.

Nothing would get past
The edges of ephemera.

What would the end be,
When Being equals Time?

There will not be a bang
Anywhere, nor a whimper.

There can only be trumpets
Of the winged proclaiming

An arrival in a regained
Haven where Death is dead;

At which time, no time
Marks being on time. Ever.

All will be late for the birth
Of God on Judgment Day.

A response to one of the Big Questions posed by Simon Blackburn in his The Big Questions: Philosophy essay
on Time and Being, "Does Time Go
By? The Strange River of Time." (pp.115-123), Quercus Publishing
Plc, 2009, London UK.

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 9: CHANGES (PROBLEMS OF CONSTANCY
AND CHAOS)

Why are things in constant flux? Why do times change and we with them?
Everything is relative then? Relative to what? Are you here or are you there?
As Blackburn asks: why do things keep
on keeping on? Is Eternity in another life a myth? A placebo? Another
world? Why struggle then for Eternity?

CHANGES

O, the times a-changin’…Times change, an’ we change with them!

Changes, as constant as they are intriguing,

slither
through as coldly as serpents moveinto crevices not unlike
meandering fog.

Inexorable
patterns, they are the unchanging

streams
running through the cherished fableswe tell and retell until
they become a reality

in air, water, rocks, and wind;
like Job I weep for peace, hope
to gently fall in the cup of palms

waiting to catch my carrion

now carved out of a shattered
world of faithlessness and fear,
unable to hold on to life or love.

On this piece of jutting rock,

have I not found the little place
where I could reach His Hand
quickly were I to fall, either way?

Simon
Blackburn is a philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge in England.
His essays "Why Be Good?" (pp. 94 etseq) and "Do We Need
God?" (pp. 159 etseq), are included in the The Big Questions, Philosophy, 2009, Quercus Publishing Plc,
London, UK.

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 12: TRANSFIGURATIONS: IS BEAUTY
AN OMEN? (WHAT IS BEAUTY? WHAT IS IT FOR? IS IT AN INTIMATION OF IMMORTALITY?)

TRANSFIGURATIONS:
IS BEAUTY AN OMEN?

A condition of complete simplicity/ (Costing not
less than everything)---Little Gidding, The Four Quartets, T.S.Eliot

Cocooned in a condition of utter simplicity,
the silkworm will not stop oozing out its tapestry
onto the point of death which is also its beauty.

How much beauty can be eked out of pain?
Like the hurt bivalved flesh of the grimy oyster,
would the papillon wings glisten like a pearl?

But this one is spun out of patience: there
must be radiance out of a cocoon’s dark
confines. It can only break into mobile light.

Colour the mariposa green, would that matter?
Dye the silk out of its consumed gossamer nets,
would that stop its flying out of a crude beginning?

Arrested from its final transfiguration, the worm
turns and it is on a table–the grub of culinary
quintessence! Quite like an earlier challenge:

“Eat of my flesh, drink of my blood. This covenant
shall not be broken. I will be with you again when
the radiance of this goblet dims into a eucharist.”

A condition of simplicity? Bear beauty and perish?
Offer an unending dream in a kingdom, and be slain?
The tale of the supreme sacrifice is also immolation.

What does it matter that I die then, if I flew out
of a trellis like the monarch butterfly, that started
as a wormed-out silkworm then food for the hungry?

I would be the worm, the injured mother pearl,
the crucified madman who asked that his flesh
be eaten, his blood quaffed, and live forever.

Beauty is an omen. Destroy this vessel of clay,
and it can only spill the reddest of wine, the
stoutest of ale: a dangerous promise of eternal life.

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 13: OCCUPYING THE GARDEN: A
HUNGER (WHAT IF I WAS MADE FOR THE OTHER? WHAT DO I NEED? AM I MY BROTHER'S
KEEPER? AM I DECEIVING MYSELF?)

OCCUPYING THE GARDEN: A HUNGER

What do I
want, what do I need? Later, I tell myself, later. There’s plenty of work, the hours
full of obligation. But I know I am not virtuous: I am always my hunger.
---From “Hunger” by Luisa A. Igloria, Via Negativa

What if this place were made only for the other?

You are yourself, but you are also others’ other.

Were you conceived for yourself, or for a specie?

Someone must extend the process of evolution.

Your first act out of the womb was to let out a
cry.

Was it not to alert the birthing other you’re here?

And you will bring joy to a union forged in dreams,

but you could always be the unwanted obligation.

What if you were the inevitable happenstance

come from the aches of groin and gravid reasons?

Are you an issue of love or lust? An afterthought?

When did you start to even aspire to be yourself?

Dare you grow then to even ask: What do I want?

What do I need? Selfish
angst? No. Must-ask ones.

One cannot give what one does not have, operatio

sequitur esse. Find and
feed your hunger to know

what you are here for. Are you a brother’s keeper?

Or does a lover keep you? Either way, a hunger.

If you were for the other, you must be
provident;

but fill your tills first before giving a ruddy
cent.

Is your neighbour the village thief? Love him.

Clothe the naked, as you would with a fig leaf.

Before long, you would have guessed how little

you are without the other, and learn to whistle

in the dark, and wait, and build, and gather

behind walls, until, one on top of the other,

you begin to climb beyond your pauper space

to occupy a lost garden, a haven, as your place.

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 14: GETTING BLANK BACK ( AM I
FREE TO MAKE A MESS OF MY LIFE? WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?)

GETTING BLANK BACK

How efficiently convenient it would have been
if we were born with erasers in both hands:
ones which could quickly rub out anything
irrelevant or inutile to a life made in the stars.

Would one miss the struggle that colours days?
Would one etch a restful stroll under the palms?
How easily could a hammock be hung on walls
when weary of a senseless shift of acts, and rest?

The start and stress of little lives is enough
to wish for all-purpose equipment to work life
out just as we want it. Aren’t we our own masters?
Why let others outside mould our lives inside?

Are we not free to sculpt our haunches, paint our
portraits, pare our own earthen jars, exist as us
regardless of them? Why not use those erasers
to blank out every misstep, every dread, and live?

How conveniently efficient it would have been
had we been able to erase the ineffectual lines
that make us shadows instead of bright forms
exact on the blank sheet we were made to draw on.

* Inspired by a poem, "Removed, " written by Columbus, Ohio poet
Hannah Stephenson published in her poetry blog, The Storialist.

Erasing is not/not drawing,/ just moving/ around what/ you think you/ didn’t
mean..../ We can’t get/ blank back,/ just as good as/new but not/ the same as/
before you drew.---From “Removed” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist,
06-19-12

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 15: QUESTIONS---NOW AND THEN.
WHY BOTHER ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS, WHEN THEY COULD NOT BE ANSWERED NOW?

As an interregnum, this poem should bring the reader back to what the
series was all about---the task of man as a homo sapiens is to ask questions
while he is around, because his effort to answer them also defines whether or
not his existence is meaningful, as transient as it is while it lasts. Why bother to ask these questions, when they could not be answered now.

1.
What good is a brilliant question,
If it could not be answered now?
Of what use is an inchoate answer,
That begs the essential question?

It is the cat catching its tail, a snake
Swallowing itself, it is the circle
That will not break, a spinning gyre
Spitting back unanswered riddles.

Is not time past after all the now
We worry an answer for? Is it time
To be anxious for, when tomorrow
Has not gone past the hurdle Now?

A condemnation by circuit pulses,
Is always an unanswered curse.

2.
That is precisely the imprecision
That presides over the fate of man
Who must answer for a finitude
He did not want nor grovelled for.

Why must time past be time future,
When there is no now save a passing
Passion for all that looks beautiful
For just a little while, a vanishing
Vision---a grand mansion of thought,
A perishing still point, a broken
Promise of eternity he cannot know,
Nor understand for its briefness?

He will ask all the bright questions,
But they cannot be answered now.

* This poem was inspired by a post by Ohio poet
Hannah Stephenson. "How do we know/ what now is /if it’s always
passing/ through us/ before we can get a good/ grip on it. ---From “What Do You
Have in That Headlock”, Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 16: ODDS: WHY LOVE
THEN OR LIVE AT ALL? HOW TRUE IS OUR EXPLORING?

Why love then or
live at all? How true is our exploring? How certain is this mock-up for staying
alive?

THE ODDS: HOW TRUE IS OUR EXPLORING?

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business/ ...Love is most
nearly itself/ Where here and now cease to matter./ Old men ought to be
explorers/ Here and there does not matter/ We must be still and still moving/
Into another intensity...From “East Coker, The Four Quartets, T. S.
Eliot

Because we could not hold on to love
As it must be held, given pure and free,
We can only try to find what is most
Nearly itself, until we get to a still point.

Time does not define where that may be,
But it must linger in the mother’s breasts,
When she suckles her infant into a life
Where there is nothing but uncertainty.

How precariously certain is this mock-up
Of staying alive when it is impermanence
That most resembles it? A will-o’-the-wisp
Or a cruel mirage hounds us, it is there

But not here. Why love then, or live at all?
When uncertain weather is most certain,
Why dare fritter precious lifetime on this
Uncharted clearing? It is our yoke to try.

We will perish trying, measure dying by
How true our exploring must be, we
Cannot stop, we simply move into another
Space, with flaming eagerness or anger.

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 17: STAYING ALIVE EVEN IF WE DID
NOT PLAN TO BE BORN---A JOIE D'VIVRE

What does it mean to Stay Alive? Even if one did not plan to be born,
why is it preferable to make a go of living it up with elan and joie d'vivre?

STAYING
ALIVE---A JOIE D'VIVRE

Because
what we now have is a life

we will
never have again, something

as
unrepeatable as living or dying,

we drink
to it as often as we turn down

an empty
cup, and learn to forgive

what was
given or not, noblese oblige,

coming as
we do to this strange place

without
as much as a warning or even

our
consent. We did not know.

Because
we did not plan to be born,

is it too
vexing to learn--perhaps

to revel
in--the myriad acts of loving,

of
living, and in return be grateful

to
perform the surprisingly magical art

of
shaping life, nurturing it, finding it

where no
one would lead us, blind

as we are
to this fire in our weak loins?

Was that
left behind by a rushed maker,

like a
spare screw, and we had to find

where it
would fit snugly, divinely apt

and
delicately, deliciously, our manner

of
staying alive when dying is better?

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 18: LESSONS ON THE LEAP OF
FAITH. (WHY AND HOW CAN ONE BELIEVE? WHY BELIEVE IN LIFE, LOVE, LETTING GO?)

Why and when must one make his leap of faith, or
not at all?

LESSONS ON THE LEAP
OF FAITH

When the
torch of desire burns clean
you would have learned all there is to learn:

To give, Datta. To feel and care, Dayadhvam.
To own and control, Damyata.Therefore,

To love
beyond all loving because it is pure
like the mother suckles her infant. Give.

To know
when caring will make things grow
like the raindrops nourish but will not sting.

To have and to hold even
when that lashes
irreducible hurts to weary hearts that care.

It is for this that, naked,
we halloo in the rain,Let it come! Let all desires fill our
dry vessels.

Then we
wake to the warm caress of the Sun
for the day is always new, the flower lovely.

Is not
the rose lovelier when its thorns sharpen?
Does not the potter’s knife need its razor edge

to pare
the lips of the wine jar and smoothen
its mouth that lovers may drink to full desire?

Bare your
body then to its wild abandon, salve
it with the cool spring water now welled

from the earth, and open
your mouth to kiss
the sunlight, defy the anguish. Never say, not
yet.

Let it come! Let the leaves fall on this Upanishad,
because the leap of faith is never to say Not
yet.

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 19: DISCARDED DAYS (ARE OUR LIVES MADE OF DISCARDED
DAYS? IS THIS OUR BEST SHOT AT STAYING ALIVE?)

What does it mean to stay alive? Why stay alive,
when dying is easier?

DISCARDED DAYS

What have we discarded,
cutting through tunnels

we must
have plodded, to quarry from lives we

might
have been accidentally given? What loves

have we
found, what hearts have we lost? Layers

of clay,
cracked stones, and silt could build us our

houses of
hurts and ruptured dreams. Not a home.

But we
take care to wake up to days we can shape,

to
moments we could mould like delicate bowls

whence we
share victual and drink for our hungry

and
thirsty souls. When travel becomes a burden

of
faithlessness or pain, we call each other out:

Be brave, hold on, take on the world if we must!

When
these passageways fall dark, we walk on.

fter
all, our lives are not made of discarded days.

This poem was inspired by a poem written by Norfolk
VA poet Luisa A. Igloria. "Time teaches a lighter tread: or/the body bound
to gravity must shed/layer after layer. What progress is tracked, /comes only
in the manner of what’s discarded: "---From “The Road of Imperfect
Attentions” by Luisa
A. Igloria, Via Negativa. 07-30-11

THE BIG QUESTIONS, 20: GETTING OUT TO GET IN (WILL
I BE MY OWN HEALER. MY LAST AND FINAL GOD?)

Will I mould myself any which way I am pleased to behold as my own
creation, not in the image of someone who chooses to be absent or gone?

GETTING OUT TO GET IN

One way or the other, we will get out to get in.
There are no borders here, nor limits, no doors
To slam. I am my own clay, brittle now, but I
Will mould myself any which way, I am pleased
To behold as my own creation, not in the image
Of someone who chooses to be absent or gone.

But who cares anymore? There are no measures
Nor beats I must march by, breathe by. I am free,
Am I not, to perish any which way I live or err?
Like my own moulder, shape or reshape my face
The way I want to meet all the same faces I meet,
And I will be my own healer, my last and final god.

Idle now, I am meant to dance at full throttle.
One way or the other, I will get in before I get out.

This
poem was prompted by: "Who pays heed anymore? Three birds in succession
thunk against the glass. Which/ one is pursuer, which pursued? Danger and
excitement. Dance at full throttle."---From “Throttle Ghazal”
Luisa A. Igloria, Via Negativa, 07-19-12

What does it mean to die? Has anyone come back to tell us what really
lies beyond? It is an inexorable truth, but aside from the clinical meaning of
dying, what emotions are felt at the critical moment? Has anyone come back from
the other side to confirm certain romanticized beliefs about eternity thereat,
or infinite bliss with one's Maker? Is it true that beyond it lies "the
nobility of man, and beyond it the only hope?"

When death and dying are lumped together
as “kicking the bucket,” there seems little
reason for a lachrymose ritual that will cost
a lifetime’s nest egg. And yet, and yet.
A send-off at sea is as good as any–one
is flushed off the starboard to become part
of whence life came, or where it ends. Debris.

Do not send for whom the bell tolls, some
tired man holding a ready bucket of waste,
warned the unready, unprepared, or untidy.
Inexorably, inevitably, the bell takes its toll.

Like a confusing game, kicking the bucket
is nothing but a tiresome waiting game.
Let the jasmine bloom where they may,
when they may; no one has yet come back
to say if they, too, were enriched by manure
from the overturned pail, nor say, when the day
the game ends, they had no bucket of waste.
—

Can we be any bigger or better than those who came before us? Why is
this necessary to find life significant and meaningful? How big can we become?

RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

The space cleared/is bigger than they were/...as the maker of the snow
angel/ once they get up from the ground.---From “Personal Space” by Hannah
Stephenson, The Storialist

I thought it was the other way around:

When one is no longer there, he will be
bigger than the space he occupied. I
cannot begin to gather the memories
grown rampant of those I have loved
and lost, they will fill my days to the brim.

How can I run with my father through

those fields with a wayward kite? How
can I sing those goodbye songs in myabuela’s tremulous voice? Will I keep
in tempo with grandfather’s steps when
I find myself walking up the winding

stairwells, my little palms in his hands?

Will I tell those tales of enchanted

elves and flirting fairies as animatedly
as grandmother Teodora, and hold
my own grandchildren in thrall? How
large a space must I have to grow with
them while I keep this quiet watch over
the rhythm of days as we bravely wait?

I will not be able to fill these spaces you

have carved yourselves when you were
here---they overwhelm me with grandeur.
How will I cope with the largeness of your
presence now that you have gone from us?

Like the lad who threw himself on the snow

to create his winged likeness, I find my
snow angel larger than I am achingly small
engulfed by lingering memories of your
abiding love and immeasurable greatness.

What, indeed, do we know about eternity? Has anyone come back from the
other side to tell us what we have known by faith or what we can hope to know
before we kick the bucket?

GRAVESTONE SCRAPING

Has
anyone come back from this defiled form

and
mapped out ways to get back to that eternitywe claim as heirs to, where
days are as chartlessas the river stream that
must flow to an endless,ceaseless fountainhead
which has no beginning?There is no other way back
except by destruction.

When
every rampart has been carted away, we

do not
pine for them like those we cannot losebecause we store them in
vaults of our memory:they are our milestones of
an afterlife we chooseto build from achieved
desires, fulfilled dreams--these chambers of a heart
that will not crumble.

What does hell look like? What is our closest look at hell where we are?
Can one live a hell of a life and stay alive?

NO EXIT

Endless
malls that have no exits
should be our closest look at hell:
too many nice-to-haves too little
time, no cash nor credit cards—
no unemployment cheques nor
bank debits, only foreclosure notes.

But
what’s so nasty about Hades
with air-conditioned corridors?
That knock-off Louis Vitton purse,
or that Burberry bag slaved over
by starving waifs in Bangladesh,
you can do without—but in this
heat, in this beastly humid heat,
why does it matter if there is No Exit
from an endless mall air-cooled
by the taxes paid from mortgaged
homes that will soon become houses
grabbed by money-lenders and realtors?

Here,
where lilac leaves hang limply
at the end of a dead dry day, I dream
of an endless mall that has no exit.
Like that homeless tramp snoozing
his hunger (or hangover) away near
MacDonald’s, I hope I never wake up.

Must have been a cheating mother,
Must have been their runaway kid,
Must have been a homeless tramp:

Who would scrawl a happy graffiti

Like that? A stock boy at WalMart?
His mom who just quit and found
A lover working nights, asleep days?

Or his sleep-deprived old man gone

Berserk with new found freedom
Having been thrown out of wedlock
And mocked as sans prowess in bed?

Is this all they need to be happy?

Work then sleep. Sleep then work.I am free. A new union mantra? Are You happy? But are they really free?

BIG QUESTIONS
30: A RAISON D'ETRE

In search of a reason for being? Why not make
it our duty to spread beauty as a reason for being?

A RAISON
D’ETRE

Imagine
if all of us were caterpillars,
all inching toward that one branch
or leaf whence we spread our wings
to carry out a bounden duty of flitting
from one rose garden to a hillock
smothered by a rainbow of pansies:

Would we
race to the highest branch
and shed our cocoon shackles quickly
to fulfill this raison d’etre of
spreading
beauty where it is scarce or now gone?
Imagine if all that we lived for were a
task as gleeful as this godlike whimsy.

Would we
not scale beyond this boot,
and swing beyond this silken thread?
Or tear through bramble or grappling
gossamer webs that drag us down
even as we crawl toward sunlit fronds
to spread our wings and get beauty done?

The Author

ALBERT B. CASUGA, a Philippine-born writer, lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, where he continues to write poetry, fiction, and criticism after his retirement from teaching and serving as an elected member of his region's school board. He was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. A graduate of the Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas (now University of Santo Tomas, Manila. Literature and English, magna cum laude), he taught English and Literature (Criticism, Theory, and Creative Writing) at the Philippines' De La Salle University and San Beda College. He has authored books of poetry, short stories, literary theory and criticism. He has won awards for his works in Canada, the U.S.A., and the Philippines. His latest work, A Theory of Echoes and Other Poems was published February 2009 by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. His fiction and poetry were published by online literary journals Asia Writes and Coastal Poems recently.
He was a Fellow at the 1972 Silliman University Writers Workshop, Philippines. As a journalist, he worked with the United Press International and wrote an art column for the defunct Philippines Herald.